Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) is a group of former officers of the United States Intelligence Community formed in January 2003. In February 2003, the group issued a statement accusing the Bush administration of misrepresenting U.S. national intelligence information in order to push the US and its allies toward that year's US-led invasion of Iraq. The group issued a letter stating that intelligence analysts were not being heeded by policy makers. The group initially numbered 25, mostly retired analysts.
The group has later been implicated in support for Russian propaganda regarding the Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections and support for the debunked conspiracy theory that Seth Rich and the DNC, not hacking by the Russians, was responsible for the leak of stolen DNC emails. as well as Patrick Eddington, Philip Giraldi, Larry C. Johnson, David MacMichael, Jesselyn Radack, Scott Ritter and others.
Foundation: The Iraq war and the February 2003 memo
On February 7, 2003, on the eve of the Iraq War, VIPS released a "Memorandum for The President" criticizing U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell's speech before the United Nations (UN), and warning against "a war for which we see no compelling reason and from which we believe the unintended consequences are likely to be catastrophic":
VIPS followed up with ten further memos throughout 2003 and early 2004, "assessing what the Bush administration knew about Iraq before, during, and after the war, and how that intelligence has been used–and misused". After CIA chief weapons inspector David Kay announced in 2004 that no stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction could be found in Iraq, Michael W. Robbins opined in the magazine Mother Jones that VIPS "produced some of the most credible, and critical, analyses of the Bush Administration's handling of intelligence data in the run-up to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq".
Two members, Bill and Kathleen Christison, resigned from the group in July 2003 following a VIPS open letter calling for the resignation of American Vice President Dick Cheney. In an open letter explaining their resignation, they said VIPS should write about policies and actions rather than personalities, and they wanted to avoid Cheney becoming a scapegoat which would end calls for further change to the Bush administration's foreign policy. They also said the memo included statements that "diminish VIPS' credibility and open it to charges of the very kind of truth-stretching that it is trying to combat". They said VIPS must be scrupulous since it is made up of "retired intelligence officers without firsthand inside information".
Israeli influence: The August 2010 memo
On August 3, 2010, VIPS publicly released another memorandum for the President claiming that the government of Israel has a record of deceiving the U.S. government and estimated that Israel would unilaterally attack Iran "as early as this month". The letter also alleges that the "Likud Lobby" has disproportionate influence on U.S. policy, giving the example of a visit to Israel by Senators John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Joseph Lieberman.
The stated purpose of the letter was to urge President Obama against using the Ghouta incident to justify military action against the Syrian government because the signatories of the letter
The Guardian Project founder Nathaniel Freitas independently reviewed Lawrence's article on behalf of The Nation, concluding that while "the work of the Forensicator is detailed and accurate," it did not prove the conclusions VIPS and Lawrence derived from it. Freitas stated that the high throughput suggested by the relevant metadata could have been achieved by a hacker under several different scenarios, including through the use of a remote access trojan, and that the leak hypothesis also requires "the target server ... to be physically on site in the building": "If the files were stored remotely 'in the cloud,' then the same criticism of 'it is not possible to get those speeds' would come into play." In sum: "At this point, given the limited available data, certainty about only a very small number of things can be achieved." Leonid Bershidsky, who was sympathetic to the VIPS allegations, wrote that, although VIPS had originally received favorable coverage in The New York Times in 2003, by 2017 they were only promoted by "non-mainstream publications that are easy to accuse of being channels for Russian disinformation".
Some VIPS members, describing it as a "problematic memo because of troubling questions about its conclusions", refused to sign the July memo, including Scott Ritter, Philip Giraldi,
The VIPS memos were promoted by Breitbart News and Fox News, leading Trump, who is known to get his news from those sources, to request Mike Pompeo to meet with VIPS's William Binney. After checking the source material, Binney conceded that the Forensicator material was indeed a "fabrication".
The Financial Times and Heavy have speculated that VIPS, and in particular William Binney and Robert David Steele, may have been involved in recruiting the networks that became the QAnon pro-Trump conspiracy cult.
The road to nuclear war: The March 2024 memo
On March 25, 2024, VIPS sent a memo to President Biden, saying in part: "[I]f France and the Baltics insist on sending troops into Ukraine, it must … be made clear that such action has no NATO mandate; that Article 5 will not be triggered by any Russian retaliation; and that the U.S. nuclear arsenal, including those nuclear weapons that are part of the NATO deterrent force, will not be employed as a result of any Russian military action against French or Baltic troops."